Monday, March 16, 2009

Status update and training

Here's a quick status update.

Logical addresses are almost done and work with the UDP and TCP transports. I have yet to support TUNNEL (GossipRouter), but because Vladimir made a fair amount of changes to GR/TUNNEL on CVS head, I'll have to merge the logical addresses branch back to head first, before I can apply logical addresses to CVS head.

Because I have some other important changes in 2.8 (e.g. anycasting support), I decided to curtail the scope of 2.8 a bit and move some stuff to the newly created 2.9. For example, currently there can only be 1 physical address associated with 1 logical address (UUID). Multiple physical addresses will be supported in 2.9.

Also, canonicalization of UUIDs into shorts was pushed into 2.9. This is largely an optimization.

Speaking of optimizations, performance of the branch looks promising ! Although we now ship both dest and src addresses with a Message, which makes the serialized message a bit bigger (for IPv4, *not* IPv6 !), UUIDs take up less space in memory and thus I got a throughput increase from 105MBytes/sec to 113MBytes/sec ! These are only preliminary results, and I have yet to run a full perf test.

I'll probably merge the branch back to head and then make the necessary changes to TUNNEL/GR this week. Then we might release an alpha, for folks to try out logical addresses.

The thing is that I'll be traveling a bit for the next couple of weeks: next week I'm near Amsterdam and April 6-9 I'll be in Munich, teaching the JBoss Clustering course (JB439). If you want to meet over a beer, or even join the course, drop me an email !
Cheers,